Caybigan Part 10

"All right; good-by," said Burke.

The doctor waved his hand, and the launch churned away.

The day was heavy with heat. The wind had died, the sea was glazed, and the tin roofs of Manila glistened white. A torpor fell from the brazen heavens, and all day Burke struggled beneath it in a frenzy of toil.

When he had cleaned the boat thoroughly, he arranged the little cabin into a hospital. Almost immediately it had its occupant. A boy was down.

Jerry laid him on his cot, pried his teeth open with his knife, and poured some chlorodyne between them; then walked to the mainmast, and soon to the watchers on sh.o.r.e the leprous banner rose against the gory hues of the setting sun. The boat came and took the child away.

When the launch came, in the morning, Burke was standing at the head of the ladder. All the traces of a fearful night were in his face, and yet Huntington's scrutiny found something satisfactory in the man. The old khaki suit had been washed, and hung, still damp, upon his frame.

More medicines and disinfectants, a supply of food and distilled water, several objects, very vulgar and very grim, were pa.s.sed up, and then the doctor asked:

"Anything you need, old man?"

Burke shook his head in indecisive negative.

"I have you on the pay-roll," added the officer, casually; "a.s.sistant inspector; three-and-a-half a day."

Burke dropped his eyes to the deck. Then he blurted out:

"Yes, two khakis."

"All right," said Huntington, rapidly measuring with his eye the frame before him. "Anything else?"

Again an embarra.s.sed silence, then another burst:

"A razor."

"I'll send the things this afternoon," said Huntington, gladder than his voice implied.

Burke went back to his work. After disinfecting his little hospital he executed, with the aid of Tionko, the Chino mestizo, whose oily good will and linguistic ability were fast becoming indispensable, a plot hatched during the sleeplessness of the night. First the men, then the women, were filed into a bath house made of sails and forced to bathe in warm, carbolised water, while their clothes boiled in cauldrons outside.

By sunset the pa.s.senger list of the _Bonita_ was clean, at least externally.

Then the usual commotion forward told Burke that his work had begun again. This time it was a child-mother, a pitiful, little black-eyed thing, with a squalling whitish baby at her breast. It was too late for the sh.o.r.e boat, so he cared for them. At midnight the baby died and, two hours later, the mother; they lay side by side and, of the two, it was the mother's face that looked the child's, and the baby's the withered old. At daybreak the boat took them away.

Weeks followed, filled with the same stagnancy of horror. The work had settled down to flat routine and life became a fearful monotony as day after day poured its brazen heat upon the empested boat. The only element of excitement lay in the ebb and flow of disease. On some days two or three, once even five, fell, and Burke's hospital over-filled and poured out its burden upon the deck; at other times there would be periods of three or four days without a case, and once the expiration of the mystical five days which was to free the lorcha from its imprisonment was almost reached when two men were suddenly felled as if by the same thunderbolt. Burke's worst periods were when the hospital was empty. On such days the routine of his duties took him only a little past noon, and then would come the full bitterness of the struggle. He found something to do and worked with teeth set, but his hands trembled, his nerves were tortured, and his eyes felt as if being pulled out of their sockets.

Then in the maddening monotony of this life there crept another element.

Before lying down to his s.n.a.t.c.h of horror-broken sleep, Jerry was accustomed to take a plunge over the side, although the waters of the bay were full of sharks. One night, as he was preparing to climb back upon the lorcha, he reached in vain for the rope that he had left dangling for the purpose. It had been pulled up just out of his grasp.

Treading water by the black hull, Burke shouted repeatedly, but a sleep deep as the night that wrapped the vessel seemed to have its inhabitants, and his cries got no response.

"Listen," finally said Burke, talking calmly in the silence. "Listen.

You know how I can swim. If that rope does not come down in ten seconds, I'll swim to the big army boat to the right there. I'll come back with fifty soldiers, and we'll hang you all to the mast. Remember, the sharks do not touch me."

As mysteriously as it had been raised, the rope dropped softly till its end touched the water. When Burke, dripping, sprang on deck, a heavy silence was upon the boat, broken only by the hoa.r.s.e breathing of the sleepers, spread about in limp att.i.tudes like the dead upon the battlefield.

A few days later, as he took up the demijohn in which he kept his drinking water, brought distilled from sh.o.r.e, he found the cork askew.

He was always careful to shut the vessel hermetically, and a sudden suspicion made him turn the demijohn over and pour its contents out upon the deck. The water gurgled out, and when the vessel was empty Jerry found a little piece of cloth sticking to the inside of the gullet. He drew it out, and an icy shiver ran up his spine. He held in his hand a little square of red and yellow calico. The last cholera victim of the _Bonita_, a woman, had worn a sarong of red and yellow calico.

He threw the demijohn overboard, and when he had obtained a new one from sh.o.r.e he slept against it at night.

Burke began to observe his crew, and this gave him little satisfaction.

Beneath the oriental pa.s.siveness, malevolence was boiling. His orders, it is true, were obeyed; but it was with heaviness of movement and dulness of eye; and in the periods of rest, sullen, squatting groups formed, that broke out in whisperings and oblique looks, to be scattered usually by the bowing, smirking, oily Chino, Tionko. And of all the ominous signs, there was none that displeased Burke more than the behaviour of the Chino--this evident eagerness to save the face of things, to glaze over the dark working beneath with a serene surface.

They were on one of these periods of immunity from disease which drew all nerves tense. Three days had pa.s.sed, then four; they entered upon the fifth. Twenty-four hours more would set the _Bonita_ free from the iron clutches of the quarantine. That day was a bad one. The solidarity in misfortune that had bound the unfortunates of the lorcha broke into a ferocious individualism. All work ceased that morning. The population of the _Bonita_ divided into groups; these segregated more and more as the day advanced, till finally each man was squatting alone, with glaring threat in his eyeb.a.l.l.s. G.o.d help the one who should come down; the execration of the whole boat was already focussed upon him.

At last the brazen day melted into the purple evening and night came, with a trembling crescent of moon in the sky and a horizon vibrating in sheet lightning. Burke prepared himself for what was likely to be his last night of vigil. He lit a lantern and began pacing to and fro to keep awake, usually an easy thing for him to do. Toward midnight, he stopped and leaned against the mainmast, gazing at the weird flashing of light at the horizon. Insensibly he went asleep. His head fell on his breast, his legs sagged beneath him, and he slid softly down till he sat upon the deck, his back against the mast.

Suddenly he found himself sitting bolt upright, all his faculties stiffened in alarm. The turbulent fancies of his slumber had merged into something tense and sharp as reality, and his ears still rang with low moans, a scurry of feet, and a strangled cry. Now that he was fully awake, however, the night was heavy with silence, only the tide bubbling and tinkling and crooning along the flanks of the boat. He lay back a moment, but his senses had been too acutely wrung, and, picking up the lantern, he walked forward.

Everything was quiet. Indistinct forms were stretched about the deck, and the breathing of the sleepers rhythmed the silence. Near the anchor, Burke recognised Tionko. The Chino's chest was rising and falling in deep, regular movement; he moaned inarticulately as Burke bent over him with his lantern.

Burke was turning away when, in the movement, the light of the lantern fell upon the rope up which he had clambered on the night of the first mysterious attack against him. Although not used any more, it had been left hanging over the side, and now, as Burke's eyes fell upon it, in the glare of the light, it was all a-tremble and a-thrill, like a live thing. Mumbling sleepily about the strength of the tide, Burke gave it a pull. A resistance met him, as that of a line with a fish hooked at the end. Puzzled, he went over the side, holding to the bulwark and bending down as far as he could, and then, as he gave another tug, two thin arms clutching the rope, and then a livid face, bobbed up slowly into the pale moonlight.

Burke let himself down, his feet against the side, his left hand grasping the rope. He bent down, his right hand caught a handful of hair, and he drew up on it. Taking the loose end of the rope, he pa.s.sed it beneath both limp arms, then, holding it between his teeth, he clambered back to the deck and pulled the whole body up. He sent the rays of his lantern into the face, and recognised it as that of a young boy of the lorcha.

He was still alive, but cholera had him. Burke understood, but it was no time for punishment. He carried the stiffened form to the hospital and for an hour fought with Death; but the shock had been too much for the disease-racked body. When there was nothing left to do, Burke turned back the blanket over the rigid face, then stood still, his eyes cast down at the deck.

"Tionko," he finally said, as if giving the answer to some problem.

He picked up an iron belaying-pin, bared his arms, and started toward the bow. As he reached the foremast, however, three shadows sprang at him from the darkness ahead. With a sidewise leap he evaded them, then waited, crouched low, with one hand upon the deck. The men scattered in a circle surrounding him, but before they could close in he sprang at one, felled him with the shock of his body, and darted behind the mast, where he stood, waiting.

There was a moment of hesitation among the bravos, and they retreated toward the bow. Burke left the mast to peer into the darkness; a knife whizzed by his head, and he sprang back to his shelter.

They came forward again, and they were four this time. Burke saw that the defensive would be useless. With one leap he was among them, whacking to right and left with his belaying-pin. A hatchet was raised above his head, but the belaying-pin cracked the wrist that held it and it clattered to the deck. A streak of fire scorched his shoulder, but the badly-aimed dagger dropped as the belaying-pin came down upon its owner's cranium.

And all this time, while he laid about him with instinctive parry and thrust, his eyes were riveted on an indistinct form in the shadow behind, a form from which came a running sound of encouragement, suggestion, command. Suddenly he sprang back, then to one side, then forward--and he had pa.s.sed the four struggling men. He took two running steps forward, then his body left the deck and shot through the air.

With a thud it struck the man in the shadow and crushed him down. Like a cat, Burke was on his feet again. He picked up the body by the waist, held it off at arm's length, brought it back close to him long enough to see Tionko's face in a grin of horror, then his arms distended like great springs and Tionko shot over the bulwarks.

He turned to the others, but they had slunk away in the darkness, and he knew that, the Chino gone, there was no more to fear.

He peered out into the water, and the phosph.o.r.escence showed him an indistinct form swimming slowly away. Then it turned back, splashing painfully, and a cracked falsetto voice whined in beggar-like modulations.

"Senor, for the love of Christ, let me on!"

Burke hesitated, and suddenly the thing was settled for him. From the right a phosph.o.r.escent flash cut the water in a streak. Swift and luminous as a rocket it came, straight toward the splashing form; it struck it, and then the spot burst out in a great bubble of light, in which Burke caught a flash of the Chino, his arms raised to heaven, his mouth distended in abominable fear. There was a hoa.r.s.e croak, a gurgle, and then the phosph.o.r.escence sank slowly and went out in the depths below. A gentle ripple undulated over the darkened surface of the water and broke softly against the flanks of the lorcha.

Burke, dizzied, walked forward. The limp, scattered sleepers were still there as before, but in one corner a man was choking in his breathing, and near the anchor another was vibrating in his sleep in one long, continuous shudder.

There came another period of suspense. One day pa.s.sed, two days pa.s.sed, with no cases. The third day came, and Burke's Demon was clutching him.

He had found in the hold some rude native varnish, redolent of crude alcohol, and had brought it up to polish the crude furniture of his hospital; and now he dared not come near it. The bucket stood by the hatch, and Burke was pacing to and fro along the deck like a wild beast.

Each time he pa.s.sed the bucket the pungent odour stung his face, filling his mind with the memory of one of his worst periods of degradation and his whole physical being with a madness to wallow back into it.